Sorry for the late notice on this one!! I have been blessed with the honor of presenting at the Bonn-to-Code.Net user group in Bonn tonight!!

I am going to be doing a fairly relaxed session describing behaviour driven development.

The presentation starts at 7:00PM. If you happen to be in the area please stop by. I am sure a great time will be had by all!!

Develop With Passion.

Yesterday, we just finished up another iteration of Nothin But .Net!! The class was an absolute blast!! The information level, was high, the energy higher, and the interaction was even higher still!!!

As you can see from the picture above, my wife was able to spoil us all with T-Shirts on the last day of the course. Unfortunately, some of the shirts were printed with the term "Develope With Passion" instead of "Develop With Passion"!!

The stats for the course are as follows:

• 3 - 14 hour days
• 1 - All Nighter
• Wrapped up at 2:00AM on Saturday!!
• 338 Revisions to the source tree (this is by far the most active code base of any prior course!!)
• 1 Amazing Day of Coding Frenzy on the last day (pretty much entirely by the students).
• 1 amazingly thoughtful gift from the class that made my week!!
• 14 Great Meals!!!
• 1 - 86 Hour Total Training Experience!!!!!
• 1 - Group of students who connected, shared, laughed, and kicked sliced and diced code
• 1 - Developer who feels incredibly blessed and humbled each time God provides the opportunity to deliver this course!!

The success of this course are the students, and the attendees once again delivered on breaking down walls and mixing up pair programming to make for a truly amazing week!!!

Develop With Passion!!

A great friend just sent me an amazing article that I have to share:

http://www.informz.net/pfm/archives/archive_647715.html

I pray that it blesses you as it has blessed me!!

Develop With Passion!!

We finished up our stay in the UK today and left from the wonderful home we had been staying in, in Broadstairs to head onto the European leg of our tour!!

The plan was to drop off our rental vehicle, catch the ferry to Calais and then finally catch the trains that eventually would lead us to Brussels so that I could do the Meet And Greet tonight!!

Well, as great as the plan sounded, we missed the last train to Brussels and so we now have to spend the night in Calais!!

Tomorrow we will head off in the morning and make our way towards Dusseldorf. I apologize to all of the people I will not be able to meet tonight!!

Bonne nuit!!

Michel Grootjans has very kindly organized a meet and greet social in Brussels for this coming Saturday the 20th of September.

It is going a be a very informal get together where there will hopefully be an opportunity to partake in lots of interesting conversations.

The venue is here: ⁃ Sint-Gorikshallen: Sint-Goriksplein 1, 1000 Brussel and we are going to kick things off at around 9:00PM.

If you are in and around the area, please stop by as I am sure that it will be a great evening.

From Brussels the next stop will be Dusseldorf for the next session of the Nothin But .Net bootcamp!!

Develop With Passion!!

I just completed uploading a fresh batch of code to:code.google.com/p/jpboodhoo.

The code is for the nothinbutdotnetstore application that was built in the September (1st - 5th, 2008) iteration of the course (2 weeks ago).

One of the things you need to keep in mind when looking at the code is that the application was built in a completely top down style and all of the code that you will see in the code base was developed from scratch over the course of the one week bootcamp.

As before, this project is just a start, but hopefully it gives you the idea of most of the players involved when building an enterprise application (keeping in mind that the purpose of the course is to teach people the core concepts without relying on third party frameworks).

How many people would be interested in seeing a store implementation that is done using all of the tools I use on my current projects (NHibernate, Castle  etc....)? This is something that I have been talking about for quite a while, I just need to get time to sit down and implement it.

Of course, there is strong potential that I will start to offer a course that is an alternative to the Nothin But .Net that will leverage third party tools in effective ways to get the application completed. My experience over the past 1.5 years is that even people who are using these tools currently are finding a lot of value in stepping back and truly trying to understand what is going on. So that they "use the tool knowing they can achieve the same result without the tool".

If you want to get started quickly with the application just check out the following screencast that explains doing the checkout and walks through doing the initial build and run of the application (there are still some things not automated yet, but I am in the process of converting all of the build scripts to a rake based build!!).

Once my work schedule settles down I plan to do a couple of screencasts discussing how the application (store) was created using BDD and top down design; which will potentially also help people as they are walking their way through it.

Develop With Passion!!

Time is running out to register for the course that will take place next week in Dusseldorf!!

It is shaping up to be another awesome event. If you have not heard about the event you can plan for the following (amongst many others):

• Long days filled with coding frenzies and lots of problem solving
• Great meals and conversations
• Great pair programming sessions
• Potential "motivation injection" (stealing a phrase from my friend Sean)

If you want to register head over here.

Develop With Passion!!

I guess I have been a little too heads down in coding frenzy mode to realize that I missed the release of VMWare Fusion 2.0 4 days ago.

This release adds a whole bunch of stability enhancements along with some killer features that now make it a much more feature complete offering:

• Virtual Hard Disk Resizing
• Multiple Snapshots and decent snapshot manager
• Multiple monitor support!!

There are so many new features that I would not be able to do it justice by bullet pointing it here, so head over here and check it out and download it if you are still using V1.0!!

I was asked this question at my last course so I thought I would share the answer with everyone!!

To get syntax highlighting for the powershell scripts that I edit I first downloaded a set of syntax files provided by Peter Provost. You can download the files from here:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1327 (Syntax File)

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1815 (Indent File)

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1816 (File Type Plugin)

Once I had copied those files into the appropriate folders:

$VIMRUNTIME\syntax

$VIMRUNTIME\indent

$VIMRUNTIME\ftplugin

I had to edit my $VIMRUNTIME\filetype.vim and add the following line:

" Powershell
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ps1            setf ps1

With that done I can open up a powershell file and get syntax highlighting.

Question for the long time Vim users. Can I not just place the files in the appropriate folders and have gvim automatically pick them up without having to edit the filetype.vim file?

Develop With Passion!!

Sorry for the delay in response about this one. You can now feel free to post comments to the posts without receiving errors!!

Develop With Passion!!

Carl has graciously requested as to whether I wanted to record some more DNRTv episodes. I let him know that I was going to get my schedule organized and then get some shows put together. Before I do that, I thought I would give this opportunity to let people drive the direction and flavour of the shows.

What do you want to see?

Develop With Passion!!